Oracle should not get piece of Android, Google tells court

Oracle should not get piece of Google Android, court hears

SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle Corp. is trying to obtain a share of Android by asserting its intellectual property rights even though it had nothing to do with the development of the smartphone operating system, an attorney for Google said in court.

Opening statements between Oracle and Google continued on Tuesday at the high-stakes trial in a San Francisco federal courtroom. Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison will likely take the stand later Tuesday.

Oracle sued Google in August 2010 over patent and copyright claims for the Java programming language. According to Oracle, Google’s Android operating system tramples its intellectual property rights to Java, which it acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010.

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Google says it does not violate Oracle’s patents and that Oracle cannot copyright certain parts of Java. The trial before U.S. District Judge William Alsup is expected to last at least eight weeks.

Google attorney Robert Van Nest acknowledged on Tuesday that Google executives had once negotiated for a potential partnership with Sun to develop Android.

“When those negotiations failed, Google engineers built Android on their own without any Sun technology whatsoever,” Van Nest said.

The lawyer said Oracle, which bought Sun in 2010, tried but failed to make inroads into the smartphone market around 2009 or 2010 and is now trying to grab a slice of Android, which is built with the open Java software language pioneered by Sun.

In opening statements, van Nest played a video of Ellison telling former Sun Micro Chairman Scott McNealy onstage at a public event that he welcomed Google’s “Java devices” and saw no reason Oracle-Sun should not have several of its own.

On Monday, Oracle attorney Michael Jacobs said Google took copyrighted Java “blueprints” to harness the creative power of millions of Java software developers, so they then could write applications for Android. However, Google never obtained the proper license, he said.

“You can’t just step on someone’s IP because you have a good business reason for it,” Jacobs said.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, is Oracle America, Inc v. Google Inc, 10-3561.